Editorial: Link to ocean an overdue idea

Our view: It's easy to ship products into and out of Humboldt Bay. But Humboldt County has no rail line to move goods on land.

The idea of building a railroad to attract commerce and jobs is so 19th century — but in the case of a rail line connecting Eureka to Tehama County, it makes a lot of sense.

Eureka has one of the few deep-water ports on the West Coast. Two other ones in California, in San Francisco Bay and Long Beach, are quite busy. Eureka's port has room to grow, especially since it's not exporting shiploads of lumber products like a half-century ago.

The problem with getting a boatload of goods from China, or trying to ship a load of, say, scrap metal or ore overseas, is that it's hard to get anything to or from Eureka on land.

In Los Angeles and Oakland, you connect right to the interstate system. In Eureka, trucks trying to get the items to or from the ships have to navigate treacherous waters, so to speak. Traveling the curvy Highway 299 or the landslide-prone Highway 101 is dangerous and, especially in winter, unreliable.

The lack of land connections is what has prevented the full utilization of Humboldt Bay as a shipping hub.

People in Humboldt County have been talking about an east-west rail line from the port to the Sacramento Valley for more than a century as a way to get gold and timber from the coast to the rest of the country. Now there are other products — imports and exports — to consider, but the need remains.

There was a north-south spur from Humboldt Bay down the Eel River Canyon (basically the 101 corridor) but that has been abandoned for years. Landslides wiped out large sections of the railroad, and the railroad couldn't keep up.

Now Humboldt County is interested in exploring that old east-west route again with a line from Eureka to the Union Pacific line in Gerber. That's half the distance of going from Eureka to San Francisco. There's no easy route (ever been on Highway 36 or Highway 299?) but that's what feasibility studies are for.

Humboldt County needs help and support, which is why it's enlisting counties along the possible route — Humboldt, Trinity and Tehama — to help advocate for the railroad. Just last week, Tehama County supervisors voted to support the feasibility study being pursued by the city of Eureka through grants.

Support is easy to give so far — it hasn't cost Tehama County a dime, and yet the rail line would give both Interstate 5, the national rail system and local farmers a connection to international markets. A large terminal near the town of Gerber could bring jobs to Tehama County.

Even after more than a century of talking about it, the rail line is only a vague concept at this point and decades away.

Still, it's worth a closer look. Humboldt County has been waiting a long time.